Sublime

On Europe’s Inner Asian frontier, demographic expansion long seemed as hobbled as it was in mainland North America until the 1750s.

The Mongol Empire was not, in fact, the last attempt to create an all-encompassing Muslim land empire across Eurasia. The final remarkable attempt was due to an ethnic Turk, born near Samarkand (modern-day Uzbekistan), who took his inspiration from Genghis Khan. Timur, known to the West as Tamerlane (Timur the Lame) because of injuries he had incur

Lehman Brothers

On the eve of the close encounter with the West, China’s distinctive political trajectory (still dominated by its symbiotic relationship with Inner Asia) propelled it not towards an all-powerful oriental despotism (imagined by Europeans) – which might have permitted drastic change in the face of external challenge – but instead still further toward

For these empire-builders, the vast grassy steppe that stretched across Eurasia from Manchuria to Hungary was an open road to commercial wealth and almost limitless power. The trading cities of the Near and Middle East were a natural target.

The repeated cycle of mass military invasion, large-scale destruction, transient unity and imperial breakup gave the Islamic world a ‘medieval’ history starkly different from that of Europe or China.

In the two centuries that followed the death of Tamerlane, Eurasia remained divided between the three civilized worlds we have explored so far, and a number of others, Buddhist and Hindu, that we have passed over in silence. There was little to show that their cultural differences were narrowing. If anything, the energetic state-building that was t

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